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Serenade for string trio in C major, Op 10

Introduction

One of the first works in which Dohnányi felt he had achieved a personal, balanced musical language, putting off these late-Romantic influences, was his Serenade in C major for String Trio, Op 10, composed in 1902 during a concert tour to London and Vienna and premiered in Vienna two years later. In five movements, beginning with a March and including a Romanza, the work is clearly in the nineteenth-century serenade tradition as developed by Brahms and Robert Fuchs. Indeed the example of Brahms, who had actively encouraged the young Dohnányi, is still to be sensed at various points. But the Serenade’s conciseness of form and spareness of means indicate a new sensibility at work. There are also hints of the genuine Hungarian folk music that would soon be explored and collected by his younger colleagues Bartók and Kodály, creating modal inflections in the work’s harmony.

The Hungarian flavour is already apparent in the crisp opening Marcia, whose counter-melody, at once soulful and truculent, has an exotic Magyar character. In fact most of the remaining movements refer to the themes of the March in a more or less sublimated fashion. The following Romanza, with its long, shapely and evocative Hungarian-inflected melody, presented in clean textures and rising to a passionate climax, clearly foreshadows the music of Zoltán Kodály. Dohnányi later arranged this ternary-form movement for string orchestra, but it is in the trio form that we can sense the remarkable textural economy of the middle section, a passionate dialogue between violin and cello accompanied merely by arpeggios on the viola. The heart of the work is the vigorous and closely worked Scherzo, which has aspects of a full sonata form and is notable for its irregular rhythms, rapid figuration and deft fugal treatment of themes which are woven together in the final section.

The fourth movement is a set of five variations on a chorale-like theme (itself a variant of the Magyar melody from the March) which evoke an almost Schubertian lyricism. The Rondo Finale is perhaps the most Brahmsian movement in character. Towards the close the sonorous Magyar melody from the first movement makes an unexpected reappearance in its original form, satisfyingly binding the work together into a structural unity, although the formal brightness of the ending in C major is surely undercut by the tune’s melancholic protest.

Recordings

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Details

The work frequently cited as Dohnányi’s first mature and wholly distinctive piece of chamber music explores one of the least patronized of all genres, the string trio. The Serenade in C major for violin, viola and cello, Op 10, was written in 1902. The string trio medium had enjoyed limited popularity during the eighteenth century, bringing works by Boccherini, Mozart, and Beethoven. Mozart’s great E flat Divertimento, K563 (1788), revealed, probably for the first time, the true potential of the form; not only does the work sound pure and complete, but its textures are full and wide-ranging, even without the second violin, and the music is characterized by a nobility and grandeur far exceeding usual expectations of the undemanding Divertimento idiom. Beethoven’s Op 3 and Op 9 Trios appeared before his early Opus 18 Quartets, in the years 1792 and 1798. His delightful Serenade in D, Op 8, was written in 1797 and contains five movements, complete with the obligatory set of variations. The early Romantic masters (there are string trios by Schubert, Hummel, and others) probably found the notion of string quartet senza second violin hard to accept; after all, how could such a combination convey the philosophical intentions of the post-Beethovenian epoch with any real credibility? Thus very few works for string trio emerged during the years which followed (Dvorák’s delightful Terzetto in C, Op 74, written in 1887, is a hybrid, since it requires two violins and viola), leaving the genre largely untended until the next century. Even then, saving rarities such as Max Reger’s String Trios in A minor, Op 77b, and D minor, Op 141b (1904 and 1915), and the Trio by Jean Françaix (1933), the literature is pitifully small.

In his Serenade in C for string trio Dohnányi provided a novel and stylish reworking of the Beethovenian ideal of the Serenade idiom, in a five-movement work of exuberant charm and beauty. The work begins with a March, un-repeated at the close, whereas in Beethoven’s Op 8 the players leave the room in prim, military order and to the theme which had announced their arrival. The second section, a Romance, is disarmingly lyrical and subtle, with evident care taken to allow each instrumental voice to function within its most effectively sonorous register. A mercurial Scherzo, fleet-footed and virtuosic, gives way to the expected Tema con variazioni, a mandatory component of the Classical serenade, and in Dohnányi’s hands ingeniously crafted and frequently offering unexpected harmonic and textural diversions of a very high degree of craftsmanship. Again, the melodic material is equitably shared between the three players before the movement (the longest of the five) reaches a particularly satisfying conclusion. The Finale again pays homage to Viennese Classicism, at least in that Dohnányi chooses to end his Serenade with a movement in rondo form. There any effective comparison with Mozart or Beethoven ends, for the Finale provides compelling evidence to show that Dohnányi’s Op 10 was his most original and distinctive chamber work thus far. The elasticity of thematic material and commanding manipulation of forces throughout the Serenade make it one of the most rewarding and fascinating of all exercises within this marginalized instrumental form.